Andrew Weaver, who is running for the Greens in Oak Bay-Gordon Head, says his party won’t be producing a fully costed platform for the May 14 election because it’s absurd for any party to try to gauge finances from the outside. By contrast, the B.C. Conservatives have come up with a detailed platform based on optimistic numbers.

VICTORIA - Some parties sweat the details of their election platforms, pricing promises, quantifying revenues, curbing expectations, all in the name of producing a document that is “fully costed” for the campaign.

Then there’s the stance taken by the Green Party of B.C. “Nobody really believes these budgets,” candidate Andrew Weaver said recently, when asked whether his party would be producing the proverbial fully costed platform before the May election.

“These are election budgets. These are election budgets by all the parties — and frankly, I think it’s a little irresponsible to come out and pretend that you’re actually costing everything at the scale and level of detail.”

Weaver was responding to a challenge from Paul Ramsey, the former New Democratic Party finance minister turned political pundit: “Parties that are serious about trying to form government produce a platform that’s fully costed during an election.”

Brushing aside the insinuation about his seriousness of purpose, Weaver, a University of Victoria climatologist running as a Green in Oak Bay-Gordon Head, focused on the absurdity of any party trying to gauge the state of provincial finances from the outside.

“We haven’t seen the books,” he told me during a recent interview on Voice of B.C. on Shaw TV. “Neither have the NDP; neither have the Conservatives. How do they know what actually the state of our financing is?

“I think they should talk about the policy directions they wish to go ... they should provide a rationale for that. The actual dollar-sign costing that is coming forward is really unbelievable. It’s political.”

As to what the public should expect to hear from the Greens, here’s party leader Jane Sterk: “What you’re going to get is the statement that we understand that we don’t know the state of the books and that when we get elected, that’s the first thing we’ll do is we’ll inform ourselves,” she told me. “We’ll use the auditor general’s reports. We’ll use the assistance of the researchers and the staff that you get as MLAs. We’ll inform ourselves. We’ll let the public know what we find out.”

In the meantime, she said prospective voters could consult the green book, the rolling platform permanently on display at www.greenparty.bc.ca, the party website. There one can find party positions on everything from raising the carbon tax to 12 cents a litre of gasoline from the current seven, to public funding of political parties ($2 per vote per year), to a moratorium on further gambling licences.

“We don’t just release policy when we have an election; we actually believe that people should know what we stand for at all times,” said Sterk. “It has everything that a provincial government has jurisdiction over.”

By way of contrast to the Green avoidance of a fully costed platform, there’s the approach taken by the B.C. Conservatives with their budget and fiscal framework, released in Vancouver earlier this month.

“The most comprehensive, detailed pre-election budget plan in provincial history,” they called it, a claim that was no more or less debatable than what other parties say in an election year.

But it surely was a clever approach. For the Conservatives seized on the most optimistic of the projections from the 14 members of the government’s independent forecasting council, Helmut Pastrick of Central 1 Credit Union, then used his numbers as the basis for building their five-year budget and fiscal plan.

The government in building its budgets, averages the 14 forecasts, then, as a further measure of caution discounts the projection slightly.

By going strictly with the high numbers, the Conservatives were able to project a more robust rate of economic growth over the next five years, 30 per cent versus the 20 per cent favoured by the Liberals.

They then plugged in recent average trends in revenues and expenditures, expressed as a percentage of economic output. Coupled with the anticipated higher rate of growth, that meant more money to spend, to keep the party’s promise to phase out the carbon tax, to fund $1.5 billion in new programs, and still balance the budget.

A fiscal miracle? Not if the economy performs above the expectations of every member of the forecasting council save Pastrick. Plus the Conservatives say they intend to prove out the forecast with policies to promote economic growth.

But a risky approach to budget-making nevertheless. For when growth falters in an open economy like ours, the upward pressures on spending continue, be it demand for policing and court services, utilization of social programs, or the increasingly expensive health care needed to take care of an aging population.

So I wouldn’t characterize the Conservative budget as all that conservative in the small “c” sense. Still, for an upstart party lacking staff and resources, the 20-page budget and fiscal plan was probably the best one could reasonably hope for in the circumstances.

Forming government is not in the cards for the Conservatives any more than it is for the Greens, barring a political earthquake, so platform expectations are correspondingly lower as well.

Not so with the opinion-poll leading New Democrats. Their promised “fully costed” platform will be scrutinized as if it were the budget of the next government, making the scheduled release early next month one of the main events of the campaign.

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